The studies collected in this special issue all
address the pivotal role of words in language
processing. Several studies investigate
quantitative properties of the lexicon. James
Blevins discusses the information-theoretic
turn in linguistic morphology. Whereas
inflectional paradigms used to be studied from
a purely formal perspective, more recently,
morphologists are finding measures such as
entropy and relative entropy to be useful to
characterize inflectional paradigms. Csaba Pléh
and colleagues apply the same measure to help
predict response latencies in behavioral
experiments on Hungarian. Hien Pham, in a study
of conceptual relations in English compounds,
also finds the relative entropy measure to be a
useful quantitative tool. A relatively new
topic in the psychology of language is
frequency effects above the word level. This
topic is addressed by Cyrus Shaoul and
colleagues, who collected subjective frequency
estimates for word n-grams.

Two studies address the lexicon from the
perspective of learning. Michael Ramscar
discusses how differences in processing between
prefixes and suffixes can arise as a
consequence of the sensitivity of fundamental
discriminative learning principles to temporal
order. Regina Henry and Victor Kuperman use
age-of-acquisition norms to study the growth of
lexical networks during language acquisition,
with a focus on the expansion of morphological
families.

Finally, two experimental studies investigate
lexical processing in reading and auditory
comprehension. Dušica Filipović Đurđević and
colleagues document the involvement of
phonological processing in silent reading by
making use of the opportunities to do so
offered by the bi-alphabetism of Serbian
readers. Mirjana Božić and William
Marslen-Wilson present an fMRI study of
auditory comprehension in English. They report
different neural substrates to engage in the
processing of inflectional versus derivational
morphology.

We dedicate this special issue to our mentor,
friend, and colleague Aleksandar Kostić, who
was the first to realize the importance of
information theory for understanding lexical
processing, and who pioneered the use of
entropy measures for understanding the
behavioral costs associated with working with
inflected words and their paradigms.

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